


that's how love feels

by independentalto



Series: (all that i can hear is) a simple song [10]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, their story! but shorter, we veer slightly from canon here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-10
Updated: 2020-01-10
Packaged: 2021-02-19 07:54:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22207666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/independentalto/pseuds/independentalto
Summary: Love's led Melinda to a lot of different things.
Relationships: Phil Coulson/Melinda May
Series: (all that i can hear is) a simple song [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1594819
Comments: 6
Kudos: 39





	that's how love feels

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by "Love Feels" by Color the Band.

Love is a strange feeling, Melinda thinks. 

It's led her in a lot of directions -- into a marriage broken by violence, into more fights than she can count, even into one of the most idiotic (her mother's words) but exhilarating (her words) decisions she'd ever made. 

As a young girl, she'd been entranced by SHIELD ever since Lian May had had Peggy Carter over for dinner. Something about its boldness and boundary pushing appealed to her; of course, the fact that it  _ wasn't _ the CIA counted pretty heavily, too. The ink had no sooner dried on her college diploma than she was enrolling into the Academy, Peggy Carter herself welcoming her with a warm, rougish smile and her first sparring match. (She'd lost.)

One could've even said SHIELD was Melinda's first love outside of her family, though that would soon be eclipsed by the charming grin of Phil Coulson -- not that she knew it at the time. No, Phil Coulson had instead been her first friend at the Academy, working his way into her life with all the persistence of a dog that had a bone hanging above its head. He was there when she beat the boxing bag off of its chain, when the male recruits decided she wasn't good enough to train against, when they'd been forced to take an elective and she'd gotten stuck in ballroom dancing, of all things. 

She asks him one night, when they're both a little beyond tipsy in the Ops' secret hideout in the woods, why he chose to be friends with  _ her _ , of all people. The rumors aren't hard to listen to: that she's cold, she's callous and uncaring. She's awful to work with, she only got in because she knew Peggy Carter, she's slept with insert instructor's name here. All of it would make anyone run as fast as they could. 

"Because," Phil had said, taking an abnormally large swig from his beer. "Just because." They graduate from the Academy seemingly prepared for anything, even assigned to the same STRIKE team. (Later on, it takes Melinda  _ years _ to admit that she'd swallowed her pride and asked Peggy to assign them together. And Phil never lets her live it down.) 

If asked, Melinda's second love would instead be Andrew Garner, and for a while, nothing matters. They meet on assignment, a seemingly innocuous mission ending with Andrew cowering behind a stack of crates and Melinda covering fire. For the first time, she has someone to tell her she's gorgeous, that every ounce of her deserves to be there with the rest of the men. That banters with her and doesn't beat around the bushes when she asks. 

He's the first man that tells her that she doesn't need to act like she isn't better than anyone, because she already  _ is _ . And it doesn't matter to him that her whole life at that moment is a series of crossroads -- he's here to stay, he tells her. And he's not leaving.

It's what love feels like, she reasons. Like everything is a good push and pull with the best of happy endings. 

She invites Phil to the wedding, of course. Andrew goes so far as to offer Phil a position as a groomsman. After all, he's not blind: he sees the way they look at each other, the way they automatically trust each other for cover. Melinda helps him buy Christmas presents for his parents, for heaven's sake. He may be marrying Melinda May, but there is no Melinda May without Phil Coulson. The wedding goes off without a hitch, and if Andrew notices that Melinda's a little more tight-lipped about the fact that Phil shows up with Maria Hill, he doesn't say a word. 

And for the first part, so does their married life. They bicker over which groceries to get, what color the couch should be so it'll match the curtains. There are nights when Melinda slumps home and into his arms, unable to talk about her missions, and there are nights when Andrew comes home with a haggard look on his face. But they make it work -- honest communication, patience and understanding, they tell people. That's the secret to a good marriage. 

They're even in the middle of trying for children when Melinda gets called across the globe on a mission so secret not even  _ she _ knows all of the details. ("If everyone knew every piece of the plan, the chance is higher that it won't work," Melinda mocks of Director Fury one night to him. "Well, if everyone knows every piece of the plan, the likelihood that we won't shoot each other in the ass goes way up, too!") On their way out, Andrew exchanges a nod with Phil, as they always do: an unspoken agreement that no matter what, Phil will keep her safe. 

Only he can't this time, and Melinda comes home not just broken but battered and scarred. She wishes there was some way she could make Andrew understand that not only can she not talk about what went down in Bahrain, she  _ can't _ . And Andrew, bless his heart, tries for the life of him. He gives her all of the space in the world, patiently offers his support, tries his best to understand that this is not something he is destined to share with his wife. But there is only so long one can go without needing at least a shell of an answer, and when Melinda still refuses to do it, the divorce papers make their way to her Administration cubicle the next week. 

(Melinda only has the heart to sign them and send them back, and Andrew doesn't know whether to be disappointed that she's done so.) 

Life goes on. Melinda continues to push paperwork; Phil wrangles the soon-to-be Avengers and watches his real-life hero sleep in the ice. Sometimes, they get drinks with Maria and reminisce about the old days, though they're quiet around the subject of Bahrain. Maria somehow becomes Fury's right hand. Phil inherits a former Russian assassin and circus archer, Melinda, unfortunately, inherits all of their paperwork. The night they learn Captain America has woken from the ice, Phil calls her with so much excitement in his voice she's not sure it registers within human hearing range. 

But then, Loki invades and Maria and Phil are called to action and suddenly there are giant worm...things attacking New York and  _ Thor _ is there, and Melinda's watching it all unfold from the Triskelion, squashed between two people she's never met when Victoria Hand appears at her elbow and leads her to a secure room. 

It's Maria, and all she can tell Melinda is that Phil Coulson is dead, stabbed by an Asgardian sceptre. If she'd thought her life had been devoid of color after Bahrain, life without Phil Coulson is practically blank. Gone are the bar nights with his easygoing grins and terrible jokes. Gone are random nights of takeout and horror movies, nights with quiet picnics on the roof and equally raucous board games nights. She withdraws even  _ more _ than thought possible, up to the point where Maria stops trying; she knows everything about it is awful, but whenever she even thinks about trying to live life without Phil by her side to experience it, the thought paralyzes her where she stands. 

But  _ then _ she's approached by Fury to be a part of a team that monitors the progress of something called GH-325, something that they've already injected into a subject and's brought them back to life. Melinda's team is disguised as a roving mobile unit, designed to aid SHIELD operations all around the world. She's hesitant, at first, but when Fury tells her she's not supposed to be anything but the pilot, it seals the deal. 

She almost goes back on it when she finds out it's Phil, though. It takes her a while to comprehend, as she imagines the reversal of anyone's death does -- there is the enraged  _ I thought you were dead _ slap, the whirling mass of thoughts going rogue in Melinda's head, the slight dent in the wall of her quarters when she punches it out of frustration. She knows why she's been chosen to monitor on this team, then: should anything go wrong with Phil, Fury knows she won't hesitate to put him down. 

Living in close quarters with Phil is almost like they're in the Academy again, bad pranks and late game nights included. Keyword being  _ almost _ \-- there's a new heaviness to each of their activities Phil hasn't seen before, and it only strengthens his resolve to bring back the Melinda of before. 

So he patches her up, keeps her six on the field, consoles her gruffly when she's insecure about Skye. (He would never do it in a soothing voice. Phil's mother might have raised a fool, but she didn't raise a dumbass.) He knows that the reason Melinda's marriage with Andrew dissolved  _ because _ he hadn't been able to make peace with the fact that he knew nothing about Bahrain. And there was no one who knew better that there was nothing to know about it than Phil himself. 

When Ward betrays them all, it's Phil who sits outside Melinda's door when she refuses to open it, waiting long after the food he brings her gets cold and the air in the hallway has gotten chilly. He never asks questions, never prods her into discussion, just hands her the tray and sits by her while she eats. Occasionally, he'll tell her the mundane things she's missed, like FitzSimmons accidentally setting fire to the curtains or Skye finally managing to mimic Hunter's accent in a feasible manner. 

Even to this day, she doesn't know how he had the patience, both during Bahrain and then. "I knew what happened during Bahrain," Phil shrugged. "And as for Ward, I just wanted you to know that you were safe, and that would never change." 

He doesn't ask her to forget her doubts. He doesn't ask her to make any leaps of faith. Instead, he trusts Melinda to do it for herself, and that she'll do them in whatever order she's willing to do them. It's the same trust Andrew had given her, only it's the trust in herself he's placing rather than in their relationship. After all, they've already been through the whole 'life-and-death' part of most marriages without even being married, so if they can survive that, Phil's confident they can survive anything. 

Melinda thinks that this, too, feels like love. It's trust in the other that they won't do you wrong, unshakeable amounts of kindness and patience to the point where the walls she's fortified over the years crumble with a single touch. 

It's easier to fall, she realizes, when she knows there's someone there to catch her. And it wasn't that she hadn't felt that for Andrew -- there were just things Phil understood  _ more _ . 

Valentine's Day isn't even in sight when Phil shows up bright and early outside her door with a bowl of breakfast dumplings, at least three oil burns and a small bee that says "Bee Mine." 

They're somewhere in between the Pacific and the Atlantic, and perhaps there are several more crises on the way, but in that precise moment, the little bee smacks into the last of Melinda's walls and brings them to the ground, along with whatever pressing issues there were to be that day. 

_ That _ , she decides, is exactly how love feels. 


End file.
